Andrew Marvell's poem "To His Coy Mistress", is a rarity for its age. Written just after the time of Shakespeare, it is pretty explicit in its sexual nature. The entire poem is basically about a man who is trying to get with a girl, and the girl keeps 'preserving her virginity'.
The poem uses the same structure as Shakespeare, the iambic pentameter. And although Shakespeare used a lot of metaphors and puns to allude to sex, I don't think any of his poems or his plays ever expressed sexual feelings as explicitly as this poem.
The poem basically expresses in the last stanza that human beings, like animals live for sex. That life is entirely too short and that making love is one of the most humanistic, passionate things that two people can do with each other. Sounds to me that he just wanted to get his rocks off!
Yes, you make an excellent point that Marvell is writing at the same time as Shakespeare. But scan the lines of the poem again; I think they come up a bit short to be iambic pentameter. While Shakespeare's sonnets are about romantic love, Marvell's poem is about physical love, or at least that's part of his poem. Would you say then Marvell's is an anti-love poem?
ReplyDeleteI would agree with this statement. I would definately say that this is an anti romance poem. It seems too rough to be about love, and more about rough sex. I dont know if I would call this anti-love, because love in this time, could be considered the same as "someone who you have a sexual relationship with". But this poem seems to take all the passion and all the romanticism out of the author's desire for the act.
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